Saturday, 28 July 2007

Here are details below of some events takingplace around Scotland on or aroundHiroshima Day. If you areaware or planning any events in your local area,feel free to let us know, asthis improves the efficiency inpublicising these events.

Inverness & Highlands

Sunday 5th August – in the evening down at theRiver Ness there will befloating of paper boats and birds onSunday afternoon shortly after 1pm from theriverside gravel bank at NessWalk above the Infirmary Bridge.

There is also a bring-and-share picnic afterwardsif the weather is fine.Also bring peace flags, peace-themedpaper boats if you can, or just bring yourselvesand your friends and relatives.

Ayrshire CND are organising a Day Of Remembrancefor the thousands of peoplekilled by the NuclearWeapons which were dropped on the Japanese citiesof Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Today 50 years after,thousands of people still suffer the effects ofradiation and unfathomableemotional pain.

The Day Of Remembrance has been organised notonly to remember the people whosuffered but also tocampaign against the replacement of Trident NuclearWeapons and the threat tohumanity which is stillposed by Nuclear Weapons.

Details of the event:

Saturday 4th August, 200712 Noon in Bridgegate, Irvine

Street Stall and Vigil - 12 noon till 1.00pm

Peaceful Walk Back & Forward Through Irvine Mall -1.00pm

Street Stall and Vigil - 1.30 - 2.00pm

If you wish you can wear something Black on theDay - a tee-shirt, a jumper, ajacket or a tie but this ispurely optional.

Contact details: Arthur West 07803 936228

Helensburgh

Helensburgh CND are organising a ceremony tocommemorate the bombing of Hiroshima.Please join us.Bring candle lanterns to float. If you wish tomake any contribution to theceremony - maybe a poem, areading or a song please contact Jim Taggart onjimtaggart@smartemail.co.uk orphone 01436 842242

Details of the event:

Hiroshima Day Candle Floating Ceremony

Monday August 6th.

Meet Helensburgh Pier 9pm

Renfrewshire

Hiroshima Commemoration, Paisley, Monday 6thAugust, evening

We are planning a short ceremony in Paisley theevening, details to follow, butplease keep this evening freeif possible.

Thursday, 26 July 2007

We are very concerned at the drive by the military to attempt to useschools as recruiting grounds for the armed services. Given the terriblewars in Iraq and Afghanistan we demand that the school authorities resistpressure for increased military input in to our education. We do notbelieve schools should be used to recruit to the military directly orthrough recruiting agencies. We demand that no military force should beallowed into any school at any time. If spokespeople for the military areallowed in to our school we demand that all students are informed inadvance, have the right not to attend the event and that there should be aright of reply from an anti war military parent or a speaker from theanti-war movement.

Sunday, 22 July 2007

This is from the Scottish Socialist Party. Union de-recognition is being rolled out faster across the country - faster than Thatcher could have even dreamed of. This is during the tenure of the "Labour Party" - which is now under the leadership of someone who has been selling himself as "left wing" for years and years (Blair never had to "spin" that lie - he likened himself to Thatcher etc)

That this comes from a former Treasury worker makes this interesting reading.

A Free Press or a Ministry of Truth?

By Paul Craig RobertsIn his novel 1984, George Orwell portrayed a future time in which the explanations of recent events and earlier history are continually changed to meet Big Brother’s latest purpose. Previous explanations disappear down “the memory hole.”

Sound familiar? Any American who pays attention can observe the identical phenomenon occurring in the US today.

Think about the Bush Rfegime’s changing explanations for the failed US occupation of Iraq. Shortly after Bush’s May 2003 announcement of “mission accomplished,” the mission revealed itself to be very much unaccomplished. Americans were told that the cause of the snafu was a small Sunni insurgency of two or three thousand at the most inspired by “die-hard Baath party remnants.” Remember the propagandistic deck of cards identifying the most wanted down to the less wanted? Americans were assured that once Saddam Hussein and his relatives and henchmen were rounded up, our troops would be pelted with the promised flowers instead of roadside bombs.

When the roundups, trials, and executions failed to fix the problem, the “die-hard” explanation disappeared. A new explanation, with no continuity to the old, took its place.

The new explanation was that Syria was allowing foreigners to cross its border into Iraq to commit jihad against the American troops. This explanation lasted until it became all too clear, despite the propaganda, that the “foreign fighters” were remarkably well accepted by, and concealed within, the Iraqi communities that were suffering all the collateral damage of the conflict.

When it came time for the US to create an Iraqi government, it was evident that it would be one dominated by Shi’ites. Then, for a limited time, it was permissible to recognize that the insurgency was popularly based in the Sunnis.

As the insurgency evolved into what the Iraq Study Group described as a Sunni-Shi’ite civil war with US troops unclear on which side they stood, the Bush Regime and the captive media began blaming Al Qaeda for the escalating violence. Americans were assured by the Ministry of Truth that there wasn’t a civil war, just outsiders stirring up conflict. This enabled Big Brother to deny that there was a civil war and to revive fear of terrorist attacks in the US and UK, the new Oceania.

The Al Qaeda explanation was soon discarded into the memory hole. The explanation implied that Oceania’s invasion of Iraq had greatly expanded the ranks and strength of Al Qaeda, thus contradicting big Brother’s claim that his war in Iraq was making Oceanians safe by stamping out terrorism. The Al Qaeda explanation had to depart for another reason as well. Cheney, Israel, and the neocons, the rulers of the new Oceania, plan to attack Iran, and so the insurgency in Iraq is now being blamed on Iran.

The Ministry of Truth has accommodated the latest explanation, just as it did all others before, without remarking on the funeral of the previous explanation. All of a sudden, a new explanation appears and is repeated until it, too, goes down the memory hole.

The American and British media work the same way as the Ministry of Truth in Oceania. A day arrives when the “truth” no longer serves the empire or hegemonic power or center of moral purpose in the world, or for short, the regime. When that day arrives, a new explanation appears and is repeated until it, too, is discarded down the memory hole.

In recent weeks Americans have been fed a series of reports from official sources that Iran is arming both Iraqi insurgents and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Experts, both within the government and without, who have been made more attentive by the Bush Regime’s false charges of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, have disputed the news reports.

But the reports keep on coming. As I write, the latest story is that the US military “discovered a field of rocket launchers near a US army base south of Baghdad armed with 34 Iranian-made missiles.” Can you imagine? The insurgents went to the trouble of lugging powerful missiles within striking distance of a US base and just left them there unfired to be discovered by the Americans. To further serve Cheney’s plan to attack Iran, the media report states: “Earlier this month, US commanders stepped up the charges [against Iran], claiming that senior leaders of Iran’s special forces and of the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah militia have trained Iraqi fighters and provided other support.” [US finds Iranian rockets aimed at Iraq base, Agence France Presse, July 14,2007]

Notice that none of the explanations fed to Americans over the years have ever mentioned, even as a faint possibility, that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq might be the cause of the violence in Iraq.

Allegedly, the US is a free and open country with a free press and a government accountable to the people. Yet, the information fed to the American people is as thoroughly false as that fed to the citizens of Oceania by Big Brother through the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s famous novel.

In Orwell’s novel, despite the totalitarian power of the government, nothing happens to people as long as they accept the government’s intrusive monitoring of their lives and do not become interested in truth or facts.. In such a world, truth and individuality pass out of human consciousness and become unimportant. Citizens survive by accepting Big Brother’s ever-changing reality.

This is what the mainstream media in the US and UK are enabling the new Oceania to accomplish. It is pointless to complain about a few Judith Millers here and there at the New York Times, or the obvious warmongers at the Weekly Standard, Fox “News,” and Wall Street Journal editorial page. The entire corporate media is behaving as a Ministry of Truth.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Paul Craig Roberts ( paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com ) was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.

Saturday, 14 July 2007

In the wake of Second Life Left Unity's recent inworld activities inviting Second Life residents to express their opposition to the destructive and disastrous global effects of the policies of the G8, SLLU member Ilia Milevhas contributed the following article, highlighting the plight of just some of globalization's countless and all-too-often overlooked victims.

“Some” of the Victims of Globalization

Eventually and several times, in some of the mass media it could be discovered some news about riots in rural China disabled by the Chinese people’s army, whether we had the chance to know it. And also it’s said that these events happened some months ago, this entire episode reported upon as if it was a weak echo from the past. This kind of news is a warning that something is hidden and for this reason could be happening in a larger scale that we can guess. That’s the fact on the China fields: hundred of millions people are in an unknown and absolute poverty. By an indirect effect of globalization they are victims of this process and they are a human clock bomb on the more populated country with highest economical growth in the world. This is a simple summary from the report “Study on Rural China” published in 2004, and awarded with the Ulysses prize, made by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, a couple of Chinese dissidents, persecuted and isolated by the Chinese government. Of course this report is clandestine in China.

But the problem, as Chen and Wu explain, is not limited on the field obviously. A huge mass of people comes to cities and a high percentage of them are there again in poor living conditions. They are described as smaller, thinner, dirtier and weaker Chinese people from the medium urban Chinese people; they are called “mingong”. Too often they become slaves on construction, and heavy industries.

These terrible facts and the ecological disasters, that happen almost every month, are the price that China pays for being the “provider” of all to the rest of the world. This is a price for the globalization. And it’s a price quite cheap for the Chinese governor’s because they consider enough following with repression and some purge of bureaucratic staff.

The victims they don’t know about globalization, or the internet, or SL, or recycling, nor alternatives and nothing at all, do they only know about their poverty and they die in a scale that we don’t really know. Curiously they are more than all the European population, the report of Chen and Wu tells about 900 millions of people. Maybe in India could exist another similar phenomenon, so our dimension to solve any problem can be considered as ridiculous unless we could help them or collaborate with them.

Then we should think which is in fact the real motor for any change in the world. And which can be our role on this.

Many thanks to Ilia for supplying this article. If you would like to be involved in our exciting upcoming inworld group projects, which will be aiming to publicise and educate on these and similar global social justice issues, please do a group search for 'SL Left Unity' and join up! Membership is free, and open - you don't need an invite. For further information on how to get involved, please IM SLUL Revolution. We look forward to meeting you!

Tuesday, 10 July 2007

Tuesday, July 10th, 2007Today, Michael Moore will be on CNN again for Part Two with Wolf Blitzer, (Did you see Part One? And our response?), a new appearance on Larry King Live with Dr. Sanjay Gupta (appearing, we assume, to apologize for his factual errors), and a rerun of Mike's appearance on Jon Stewart from 13 days ago.Those of us who maintain Michael's website have started a truth squad. Watch for our daily reports on how the media lies, distorts and carries the water for Big Pharma and Big Insurance.We'll leave you with this analysis of how the mainstream media deals with Michael Moore.Thanks!WebmasterMichaelMoore.com

"Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught in falsehoods school. And the one man that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool" -- Plato.

"I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not so desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right" Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849

"As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever" Clarence Darrow

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality" Bishop Desmond Tutu

"He does not believe who does not live according to his belief" Thomas Fuller

Friday, 6 July 2007

IF YOU ARE BROADLY IN AGREEMENT WITH THESE, PLEASE CONTACT SLUL REVOLUTION TO FIND OUT HOW YOU CAN BE INVOLVED!

OUR CHARTER:

The SLLU seeks creative, non violent means to foster revolutionary social dialogue. We oppose capitalism, as well as racism and sexism as a part of capitalism. Our goal is to develop socialism in order to maximise left activity and thought on SL.

SLLU originated from members of the Scottish SSP, and is now part of a world wide left unity movement in SL. We are a diverse group, united around social justice and anti-capitalism. We are a democratic collective.

AIMS & PRINCIPLES1 Our name shall be Second Life Left Unity (SLLU)

1.1 The group offers the means of a left environment, the term Unitydoes not claim anything since there is no monopoly. It is a proposition.

2 The SLLU stands for the transformation of society. To replacecapitalism with an alternative classless, stateless economic systembased on collaborative democratic ownership and control of the keysectors of the Second Life (SL) economy. A system based on physicalfreedom; artistic freedom and environmental protection rather thanprivate profit and promotion of Real-Life mass produced corporateproducts.

3 The SLLU will provide political support and solidarity to all thosewho are involved in fighting back against injustice, whether it betrade unionists, community organisations, tenants groups, antinuclear protesters, animal rights campaigners, anti racistorganisations, feminists, anti-war groups, mental health advocacygroups, LGBTI rights organisations and other campaigns and protestmovements.

4 The SLLU will oppose discrimination in any form on the basis ofrace, religion, language, nationality, sex, sexual orientation, ageor disability - and on SL - species.

5 The SLLU will campaign for a an environment where each individualuser is fundamentally considered to be equal: we stand inopposition to the divide between digital haves and have nots and seeka balance between technocratic power and citizen power. Recognisingthat in SL sovereignty resides, and ought to reside in the people,the SL citizens, regardless of membership privileges, as opposed tothe fiefdom of the Lindens and will always seek the citizens' priorconsent to any transfer of powers outside SL.

6 The SLLU actively promotes the international solidarity of theworld community and oppressed to defeat capitalism and imperialism.While preserving its political and constitutional autonomy the SLLUwill build the closest possible links with peace loving, leftradicals, socialists and left revolutionaries. across SL and the realworld (RL).

7 We oppose the use of violence as a group strategy within SL.By violence we refer to the use of symbolic RL or fantasy weaponryand/or the imposing of our will on others by forceful means. Rather,we are committed to encouraging the empowerment of all individuals,through education, debate, and consensus.

8 SLLU firmly stand for the bringing of international cooperation andawareness through education and the discussion of the issues raisedby capitalist hegemony which the RL mainstream media systematicallyfail to report. SLLU believe that by avoiding authoritarian teacher-pupil models of education and based on peoples actual experiences andcontinued shared investigation, every human being, no matter howimpoverished or illiterate, can develop a new awareness of self whichwill free them to be more than passive objects responding touncotrollable change. As Freire said, and SLLU agree, eachindividual wins back the right to say his or own word - to name theworld.

Thursday, 5 July 2007

This has been called in response to the attempted airport atrocity, by a combination of mosques, other faith organisations and supported by trade unions - and us, the SSP.

We condemn the appalling terrorist attack on Glasgow airport – which could have caused murder and mayhem to innocent men, women and kids.

We stand united against such atrocities - which affect all communities.

We condemn those using the excuse to carry out racist attacks on ethnic minorities - the Muslim people of Scotland must not become scapegoats for an atrocity that they have openly and angrily condemned.

We call on the new Scottish government to carry out its election pledges and pressurise Gordon Brown to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, as a step towards stabilising Scotland - to help build peace, justice and unity in the community.

Please – if you are in Scotland, and can get to George Square, Glasgow, come show solidarity with the ordinary people who were targeted and with the Muslim people of Scotland who have condemned this action.

Mosques and Islamic organisations in Glasgow havecalled for a rally on Saturdayto demonstrate theirresolve against terrorism. It will take place oneweek after the GlasgowAirport attack, with it alsobeing the second anniversary of the July bombings.

They are inviting everyone who can to take part,under the title “Scotland United Against Terror.”Faith leaders, churches, trade unionists and othersin civic society have been invited to attend, whileDeputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has confirmedshe will speak.

Commenting, Osama Saeed, one of the organisers said:

”The incident today in Riddrie [someone backed acar into an Asian shop and set it on fire]underscores the need to emphasise communitycohesion at this point.

We have a simple equation facing us. We havethe terrorists on one side, and the rest ofagainst them on the other - whether they beMuslim, Christian, people of other faiths ornone. We mustn’t start accusing people of beingterrorists when they plainly aren’t.”

Tuesday, 3 July 2007

We have been given the opportunity to purchase our own land, which we can then use for a group project. We can buy this land with the money we have in the coffers at the moment which amounts to L$37000. In order to keep this land and our current projects we will need people to donate regularly - donation boxes can be found in the new coffee shop.

Comments about this offer can be made to SLUL Revolution. We have a deadline of Tuesday 3pm GMT - so comments before this please!

WELL DONE all of you who are rallying to the cause! We have L$38436 in the coffers. WE NEED MORE to keep moving!

Consider a regular donation-this will mean the SLLU can rely on funds for regular payments like rent(eg our Coffee shop), donations to orgs who have donated land (eg.the garden and the future factory sim) and tier when we have our own land.

Monday, 2 July 2007

I ask SLLU members to make an outright condemnation of the attacks in England and Scotland. People have been reticent in giving views on this.

In my opinion, it is easy. The people who did this are stupid to think the appalling act of killing holiday makers will ease the conditions in Palestine or Iraq by giving the “West” a taste of what has disgustingly happened in those countries because of a terrible and very mistaken foreign policy initiated by Bush and Blair.

Nor will it make those in power in western countries, or those in subjection in UK/US decide to push their governments to ease the situation in the Middle East.

SLLU members should condemn the attempts on the lives of ordinary shoppers/ night clubbers/ travellers. We also acknowledge the fact that these embittered people/organisations would not be attacking us if our so called leaders had not sanctioned attacks on their livelihoods/countries/families.

The solution? – Uk and US out of Iraq! Allow the people of Iraq to come to a solution without US market and political pressure.

Allow the people of the Middle East to govern themselves and allow them to sell/distribute their own oil/resources for the benefit of their own country – which will allow them freedom from the World Bank and IMF – and those organisation's stipulations - ie. what they constitute an “unfettered market”.

UK should support the formation of a Palestine state without Israeli/US/ US political or US market conditions. UK/US should as a first step, stop selling and servicing weapons to countries in the area that have been modelled in their image by their regimes. These countries, rather than imposing a solution via their hand selected emissaries, should allow the peoples to have honest and open talks.

Other SLLU comments welcome on this subject. Im me or place comments on Blog. ALL comments will be placed on the SLLU blog. - http://slleftunity.blogspot.com/